


Send Your Past Running (While You Stand Still)

by redbrunja



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, F/M, Gen, Natasha Romanoff Feels, Red Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-15
Updated: 2012-10-15
Packaged: 2017-11-16 08:53:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/537681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbrunja/pseuds/redbrunja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha's past is another country; and she hasn't lived there in a long, long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Send Your Past Running (While You Stand Still)

It was a trap.

A badly designed one, too.

The restaurant was full of civilians, the tables were too closely spaced to provide room to maneuver, it was too loud to talk discreetly, and former general Bogdon Volcheck had hired too many mercenaries and placed them badly.

If anyone pulled a gun - anyone besides her or Clint, obviously – the civilian causalities were going to be extremely high.

Natasha was glad she'd ordered dessert minutes after she and Clint had jointed Volcheck at his table. She could already tell they weren't going to be staying long.

Two weeks ago, rumors of old Red Room tech being auctioned off had reached SHIELD's ears and sixty-two hours ago former General Volcheck had reached out (through various intermediaries) to Natasha and requested a meet. He could have relevant information and/or be in the mood to start bargaining with SHIELD. Natasha had doubted it even before she'd sat down and after fifteen minutes of Volcheck making obvious attempts to get under her skin and making blatant eye contact with his team's point-man, Natasha was convinced he had nothing of use to SHIELD.

She didn't bother to hide her boredom. Really, the only thing of interest in this entire equation was how fast their waiter had managed to bring out her dessert, considering the number of customers.

Volcheck paused for a moment, visibly switching gears, and then shifted his focus to Clint.

"Natalia gives fantastic blow-jobs, doesn't she?" Volcheck said, directly addressing Clint for the first time. "You should thank me – I was the one who taught her how to suck a man off."

"One of the ones," Natasha corrected blandly, tracking which members of the wait staff and which customers had tensed, twitched, frozen, or otherwise gave away that they had both heard Volcheck and expected that conversational grenade to lead to the physically violence portion of lunch.

At the table nearest them, a civilian woman who had overheard the former general gave him appalled look.

This was such a bad choice of venue.

Next to her, Clint didn't react in the slightest.

Volcheck's words were a clumsy, obvious blow. One that still landed. She remembered his hand on her shoulder, his voice choked as he told her when to lick and when to suck and the way he'd patted her head, absently, like she was a dog, when she swallowed. She remembered handling her early seduction training the same way she'd handled being whipped and electrocuted and waterboarded; with detachment. She'd made her body something almost entirely separate from herself, so it didn't matter what her handlers did to or with it.

Sometimes the most effective techniques were the least sophisticated.

Natasha took a bite of her prinzregententorte, the bittersweet chocolate smooth across her tongue, the cake itself almost impossibly airy in her mouth. She dragged her fork through the decorative rosette of buttercream nestled against her slice of cake, licked the tins clean in one long stroke of her tongue.

"You have excellent taste in restaurants," Natasha commented. She twisted slightly in her seat and under the guise of giving Clint a taste of her dessert determined that the couple sitting at his six were not part of the team Volcheck had hired. Clint bit down hard on the fork and she met his eyes briefly, realized just how completely enraged he was.

She held his eyes for an extra half a second, making sure that he wasn't going to do anything emotional and stupid

"Do you have any recommendations for Zurich?" Natasha asked, observing Volcheck's reaction in her perpheral vision.

"Zurich is a dull city," he blustered.

The man was an imbecile to think that he could kidnap her and thus solve his financial problems. The reasons why Volcheck was a moron and Natasha was wasting her time and SHIELD's resources were rapidly becoming too numerous to list. By the time she finished the paperwork, she'd have spent the majority of the day on this pathetic, incompetent fool.

Natasha took one last bite of her prinzregententorte. The cake was superlative; she'll give this operation that much.

"Enjoy dealing with your creditors," she said, voice light and amused. She kicked the table over and threw a knife into the throat of Volcheck's point-man in one smooth motion. The routes to the kitchen and the front door had been blocked, but they only had one man covering the deck. Natasha broke his wrist before he could finish getting his weapon out of his holster.

She took his weapon from him, ejected the clip, and slammed the empty gun into the man's temple.

He dropped like a sack of potatoes. Natasha kicked him in the groin to make sure he stayed down and then threw the clip at an operative who'd chased them onto the deck. He ducked and then came at her with a taser, enough of a professional to use non-lethal tools in a venue this crowded.

Natasha snapped the cloth off of the nearest table, so fast the silverware didn't even shift, and used it to knock the taser's electrodes away from her. The motion of the cloth blocked his sight momentarily. She crouched and spun into a low kick that took his feet out from under him. She stayed low, grabbed his neck, and slammed his head hard into the boards of the deck.

"Any time, Nat," Clint commented, zip line attached to the railing.

She performed a flawless back handspring to Clint's side, avoiding the trailing conductive wires from the taser. Clint wrapped an arm around her waist and they went head-first over the railing.

~~~

"You're improving," Natasha commented, one foot pinning Coulson's right wrist to the ground, her practice knife at his throat, and his left hand almost in the correct position to twist the wooden blade out of her hand.

Coulson's lips twitched in an expression that looked mildly put-out and would be a frustrated pout on anyone else.

"Again," Natasha said, rising to her feet.

She offered him a hand up. (Her version of an inspiring pep talk.)

"Agent Barton left at ten page memo on my desk this morning," Coulson said, a half an hour later, breathing heavily as they walked to the edge of the gym.

Natasha raised her eyebrows, assuming she's misheard. Or that one of those sixteen falls Coulson had taken in the last thirty minutes had been harder than she'd intended.

"Single spaced," he clarified, and took a long drink of water, settling himself on one of the benches set again the wall. She rested her foot of the back of it, started to stretch out her hamstrings. She felt unsteady, and wasn't entirely sure why. She automatically checked that no other agents were in earshot.

"Clint has never written that much in his life," she said. Which was true. His report for the entire seven months they'd spent in Varna had been less than a page. (Her report for that operation had approached the word count of a Tolstoy novel, largely due to her determination to drive home _exactly_ how bored she'd been in Bulgeria. She'd been very, very bored.)

Coulson looked calm. "Agent Barton made a very convincing case for why Bogdon Volcheck should be deleted."

Natasha straightened, feeling her cheeks flush, affection blooming her belly.

"Volcheck is a bankrupt idiot who's best chance for getting his creditors off his back was a weak attempt to sell me to the highest bidder," she said, keeping her face free of any expression at all. "He's a waste of SHIELD's time and resources."

"I've already authorized it," Coulson said. "I wanted to know if you'd like to handle it personally."

There were many different ploys that handlers could use to inspire loyalty in their assets. Natasha had used them and had them used on her. She knew what they looked like and they did not look like a ten-page memo by someone who hated paperwork or a man who hated inefficiency sanctioning an operation that would not benefit his organization.

"Right of first refusal?" Natasha clarified.

"Exactly," said Coulson.

"Pass," she said. Natasha let herself smile at Coulson, just a little, who smiled back, his expression subtle and open at once.

"Let Barton have him," she continued. "Clint will enjoy it more than I would."


End file.
